Mayor Adams has always had a startlingly over-casual attitude toward the appearance of corruption. His mayoral campaign and administration have been dogged by federal investigations and press reporting of irregularities from the start. But they’ve always been peripheral to his election and re-election platform: cutting crime.
The latest round of federal raids, at the homes of his three top public-safety officials, changes that, and thus imperils Adams’ only already fragile claim to mayoral success. Last Wednesday, federal investigators executed search warrants at the homes of Police Commissioner Edward Caban, Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Phil Banks, and Tim Pearson, a top Adams aide in charge of migrant-shelter security operations (plus a couple of other City Hall high-ups, but that’s already enough). No one is under indictment, and the feds often mess up.
And yet: Nobody is shocked by this development, and this cynicism is entirely Adams’ fault. Upon taking office in 2022, he tapped Banks — even though a decade previously Banks, then the top uniformed police official, had been caught taking high-dollar gifts from influence peddlers. (Banks wasn’t charged with a crime, but others were, and were convicted.
) The Post’s editors warned that hiring Banks would “hobble” Adams’ “war on crime.” Pearson, too, is cavalier with the rules: Early on in the Adams administration, he tried to keep both his new City Hall gig and a casino security-chief job , even tho.